October 2011 is the centenary of the birth of Brian O’Nolan, as well as that of Flann O’Brien, Myles na gCopaleen, Brother Barnabas, George Knowall, John James Doe and all their literary associates. To mark the occasion, Trinity College Dublin will host a conference examining O’Nolan’s work and legacy in the twenty-first century.

Writing as Flann O’Brien, he became one of the most critically acclaimed novelists of the modern (or post-modern) period. As the Irish Times columnist Myles na gCopaleen, he also achieved a popular success unique among his generation of Irish writers. The conference organisers invite consideration of Brian O’Nolan in all his literary guises: as an experimental novelist and a surreal humorist, as an Irish modernist and a self-styled populist, as a cultural critic, a bilingual author, and a classic exemplar of the writer’s writer.

The conference organisers particularly welcome discussion of O’Nolan’s position in Irish culture as well as his significant international legacy, his work in the Irish language, his movement between the experimental modernist novel and a mass newspaper readership, and his influence on contemporary writers.